My friend Ilan doesn't really believe that it's possible to separate the personal and the political. Once, when we were seated together at a wedding reception, he refused to drink wine from a vineyard in the Golan Heights. "No, thank you," he said cheerfully to the waiter, "I don't drink wine from the occupied territories."

I told him that he could have stopped with "No, thank you."

But Ilan's attitude to politics is relatively rare in Tel Aviv - even these days, with news of the disengagement taking up so much newsprint and broadcast time.

When I accompanied an American reporter on a tour of Tel Aviv's nightlife last week, he kept asking people - on the street, at various bars - whether they discussed politics (no); and he kept asking me why so few drivers were flying orange or blue ribbons from their car antennae.* Mostly, people seemed perplexed by the nature of the journalist's questions. When he told the owner of a well-known cocktail bar that he had recently visited the West Bank settlement of Sa-Nur (soon to be evacuated), the bar owner said, "Sa who?"

After we'd left the cocktail bar and spent some time talking to various people on Lilienblum Street, which is a very happening scene, I took the journalist to Evita, a popular gay bar. There we met a couple of American guys who told the journalist that they felt more comfortable being gay in Tel Aviv than in New York. Later we went on to a nearby lesbian bar, which was still doing brisk business at 3.30 in the morning.

As we were preparing to end our night out, at around 5.30 in the morning, I said to the American journalist, "See, isn't it nice to meet real people instead of all those extremists you've been interviewing over the past few weeks? This is the real Israel."

The journalist looked at me kindly and said, "My friend, you're swimming in a deep Egyptian river."


*Orange ribbons are anti-disengagement; blue ribbons are pro-disengagement.